krabat-0 Reviews

Beyond Existence (2022)

once in a while a movie like this comes along.

[10/10 · 29 November 2023]

Old man: what should we drink to: Love?

Ellen: No, how about morality, and to live one day longer?!

This is not a usual moral play. The old man is apparently being very upfront about the plans of the aliens, as he is able to relate them, and there might not be very much to do about them - but he's got a plan C: Teach them human emotions and simply hope that will be enough to sway them away from enslaving or eradicating the human species.

(Even if the old man keeps saying the human "race", and she does too, and it's annoying the s**** out of me. Human SPECIES, please! WE are a species, not a damn political object of equalising different colours, all genders and all ages, what have you. Species!)

For how can it be a moral play - the best and most right thing to do winning over the lesser solution, the lesser way out - when survival is all you have to come up with as a reason to live...?!

Even so, Ellen is doing the noble thing, which is doing the ONLY thing that is bigger than her self, as a hopeful gesture towards the survival of the species: She gives up her memories and experiences, she bares her soul to the only thing that can eradicate any chance of perpetuity; SHE is the only thing that can make this into a moral play - and we don't even know why she as a person would do that, contract killer and all. This action has not been predicted as part of her character in the way of normal drama, she just wants to do it, do it for the only right reason, as a risk of sacrifice to save all from enslavement by alien overlords, who can never care nor understand what humanity will loose - what the galaxy will loose, if the human species is stripped of its freedom to learn from mistakes caused by emotions. Even if we do not know Ellen's motives, it is the logical, the ONLY thing to do, when everything is at stake. She is channeling our WHOLE species, and what she does is right!

She is neither rewarded nor tasked for her action, it is simply who she is and was all along and the reason for everything from then on and since the dawn of existence, it could have been everyone, except it is not, because she is the center of focus right this instance.

Enjoy.

1/10 - or 10/10 - it doesn't really matter. You will watch it or you will not. You will find yourself in it, or you will not. You will agree with the focus or you will not. You will watch it to the end. Or you will not. If you do, maybe you will have a thought. A recognition. Everybody deserves that.

Visitors (2022– )

Welcome to the French metaverse.

[8/10 · 25 July 2023]

A lot of US viewers critique shows and movies "with subtitles" or "even if it is in French", as if English is the only language in the world. It's not even a culture onto itself, like so many other languages are.

Get used to the mockery and cringe in this show, it will deepen into human relations and take turns worth the ride. There are ALSO a lot of holes, both in story (possibly the editing of the whole series loosing parts) and characters, which are unwavering flat, unfortunately. <

But my guess is the ending does not lead to a season 2. Even if spectacular, though incomprehensive: WHY DOES HE DO IT?" Out of curiosity or what?

My guess the ending spells a wrap-up to a cancelled show... just checked; Yes, it was renewed and then cancelled. But it's alright as a miniseries as it is.

Definitely binge-worthy. 7.5/10.

Living (2022)

A fine day to be alive, the day your death

[7/10 · 4 March 2023]

It feels like a re-creation of an older way of making movies with a modern feel-good message integrated.

There is never anything to be afraid of in this movie. - all things will be become better, as the movie progresses. The only thing to fear is losing your own way for a path of complicity in passivity - but then you can remember the way the main character was guided towards his death by coming alive through rememberance. By respecting the memories that he liked. And by this small thing disregarding all other things, bad and irrelevant, in the way we today call "self foregiveness".

Life is when you are feeling it. Death is when you are not. And by this living is a series of rebirths and deaths - coming into yourself takes the sacrifice of what was wrong for the jump into what is better.

Living takes courage. I take that away from this. Being led astray by fear or boredom or responsibility is easy. Staying alive... not as easy. But chances are presented to you, and you had better be lucky, when they do.

On a personal note: A old friend of mine once said: No one is born lucky. You reach for luck.

Our main character here reached out. He was honest. And he found himself again.

7.3 for style, acting and execution. Would have been higher, had it not been for the odd break towards the end. I understand the mechanisme, but I do not agree with it.

Next Exit (2022)

The forgotten art of giving up - in wolf's hide.

[9/10 · 21 January 2023]

The first 3 minutes, leaving the door ajar, boy meeting dead loved one.

A lot of movies today are mixing tropes like mad in order to tell a story in a NEW way, not dissolving or challenging tropes, but increasingly dissolving genres.

I never did like genres anyway, even if "science fiction" as a genre has been my guiding star towards a good many movies that had nothing to do with science and much much more with making the future a SPACE, where some desired things would become possible, other things freekin obvious, and all the rest just inevitable (says fears and projection). The future is a great place to be. And an even better transit station for even better things to come. Or worse, if you are into that. I am not.

I like a good yarn. And this is a good yarn:

"I can promise you there is something after dying, come see for yourself, we are all about science". And so people do, the leads do, and as we know: Forced travel brings people together, who would never have given each other the time of day.

There is so much grief in the world presently. Things we though over are not over, things we hoped to stop seem unstoppable, we are not sacred as a species, nor holy or evil, or even thoughtless - the universe, or simply life and climactic functions on earth, only has one way of expressing reaction to our disruption of evolutionary rules and that is reacting to disruption like a child rather than intention or logic reacts to intention with great precision, if permitted...

It is a painful movie for me. They are both beautiful, and become even more so, through their acts of love and courage, and when forgiven, we are right there forgiving them too-

THIS is what we want: Loving and being forgiven and forgive and love, to not give up..

OK Computer (2021– )

7.3

[7/10 · 29 March 2021]

TV becoming internationally viewed, and subtitled too, may not be all good for individuality in the long run, but it does bring a lot of weird and possible culturally unifying observations along with it, if one is to believe there still is such a thing as cultural honesty (rather than catering for the masses).

This slight projection into the future (2031) presents the struggle of equality between humans and robot similar to how white people struggled to believe blacks had feelings and intellect, only we are more used to polarised struggles. The director has something important to say, not new, but more and more relevant, but first he needs to lure people in with a mixture of 1980s aesthetics and B-movie budgets, unusually fine direction and acting, and a crazy convoluted story, which for dramatic reasons could have been over in 2 or 3 eps, but HAD to be extended to attain the platform at the end of episode 6, where the speech is delivered to the 1 billion people of India, as well as the rest of us.

My mouth was literally agape with incredulousness for 3 episodes, but I cannot say how happy I am I let myself be lured, ushered, dramatically forced, enticed through the last 3. The end really is dear. And logical in a way that suits science fiction greatly; one cannot demand more from such shows: Even when they are brilliant, any story are still only HEART or NO HEART. This one is HEART.

PS: I am positive the voice of the protagonist robot is brilliantly designed to keep the audience biased. Prove me wrong.

Instant Dreams (2017)

The impossible dream - and the faulty docu

[6/10 · 20 March 2021]

So, where is the recipe? Or rather, where did it go? How did it get lost? What is the story about that?

This mystery is dangled in front of our noses, but never delivered - for reasons unknown. Maybe it was an unknown in 2016/17, when the docu was assembled, and maybe - I haven't yet googled it - it has never come to light, how the recipe of the original Polaroid chemistry was lost. But it remains, after this movie, the most interesting mystery. Especially following the claim that the Polaroid chemistry for instant developing is and was the most complex fully man made chemistry in the world. I want to know!!

In stead we are given half a story of the loss of the analog instant - the chemistry on the same level as our bodies - which I agree with, it being the reason for me to watch this documentary alt all - infused with delicious colours and examples of people using the remaining part of expired Polaroid films in the world, in 2016/17 (probably not anything left now), which is stragely devoid of actual LOVE of the Polaroid, and more like brainstormed examplifications. Not uinteresting, just not what the movie could have been.

Sadly. And still not a stable recipe (2021) with the same sprectrum of colour and versatility of the old Polaroid recipe. BUT admirable - the people behind the Impossible dream - and loving fortification against the digitalisation of human interaction with the world. Un-editable photos of the moment that you know originates in that moment.

Shuffle (2011)

8.5 is my bid on this

[9/10 · 9 January 2021]

Many others have found this a brilliant film in its own right, which is how a work of art should be judged, in my mind. Is the director, script, actors, light, camera, sound, scenes, movement and progression working together to make a cinematic whole, or to what degree did it work - that.

On those conditions I bought the experience fully.

When Lars "von" trier made "breaking the waves", and ended the movie with bells in the sky, he obviously wanted to piss in people's shoes.

This director, when ending the film with images that extend themes already portrayed in the film, going against that is similar to rejecting part of the premise of the film, its reason to be. The theme would not be there, had the director not wanted them there as part of the store. And to my eyes and heart they fit the story of a love greater than live.

Time out of sync is a known, but rarely used trope, as it is hard to give credence. Hére it is employed almost like a character in itself, cards being shuffled by fate, with the added pain of remembering the previous fragments he found himself in for a day. Not a Groundhog Day story of learning to find yourself and become nice, not a desperate story like The Astronaut's wife, but a story in its own right.

Which ends, where it should end, based on the core of the story PUSHING all through to the very end.

I loved it.

The Midnight Sky (2020)

A messy script, or were scenes added to satisfy a test audience?

[5/10 · 29 December 2020]

MANY SPOILERS AHEAD!







Goes to say without a doubt that the effects are spectacular. Ice, space, above, below, all good.

But the script seems to let all good efforts and money down.

Great setting of scene, but the girl possibly having been left behind is the vital turning point for a untrustworthy storyteller. Without this we would have no reason to root for Clooneys character. Which turns out to be a story of regret - what he Would have done, Had he been like he is today. And once we reach the conclusion to the technical story - the contact between the remaining vessel and Earth - the girl vanishes. And the whole story turns highly Biblical, even more so than prior to this, as he finds redemption by being driven to "think of other people", ie. the girl and the people on the vessel, and try to give humanity a fresh start. Even though the odds are most likely only "continuing to live now rather than dying now". But as HE was the one believing in the discovered planet just visited, it is only fitting that he saved his daughter and grandchild IN THE FUTURE. Or rather: Gave her and the child's father a place to go to. "If not the whole of humanity, we will just start over with 3 people. And then the father has to impregnated the (as yet unborn) daughter, once she reaches maturity, or some un-mentioned embryo-growing facility is on the cutting room floor too, or they forgot to mention the fact, while leaving a door open to all the things they will expose their own children to in the name of furthered humanity... (doesn't take too much speculation in order to come up with the consequences of being only 3 people on an otherwise unpopulated planet.

And then there is the "event" causing the destruction of the Earth, which is never explained. Such you can get away with, if your allegory is bigger, stronger and more valuable than any (humongous) plot device. THIS is not the case here, though. Every human dies, and the second last story told is of redemption and the biological imperative with a little darwinistic-deselection-of-the-weak and family unit of soon-to-be-three thrown in.

And if that is not enough the script wavers and lingers from action into almost standstill, while new information to feed the coming action is delivered.

It is a BAD movie, and much more so in light of all the wasted energy. I watch a LOT of movies. I consult resources, I write my own stories, I know storytelling. And I am flummoxed by the fact that this script AS IS SEEN HERE was ever produced. Or does it reside on the cutting room floor? The little girl Clooney's character saves may have been a real one rather than an imagined so, and test audiences found the fact that the little girl had to die also less than enticing, so they made her into an imaginative one in order to make a moment, where Clooneys character might be the actual father of the saved woman in space.

Looking at the whole film AS IF she was in fact alive rather than imagined, makes a whole lot more sense, when you look at all the actual hardship Clooney's character endures in order to cope with bringing the girl along In order to save the remaining humans in space.

But that still leaves the pacing of the movie etc.

Glad I watched it, but annoyed I might never or just in a long time discover the actual story behind this idea to portray the biological imperative in this way.

(Sorry for the inspirations scattered all over the place, tried to keep it unspoiled for as long as possbile, and can't be bothered to go back and polish it).

LX 2048 (2020)

Deadly pacing, but BRILLIANT script reminiscent of PKD!

[7/10 · 25 September 2020]

This is a GOOD manuscript. And one of the most lonely, up-to-date depictions of modern online society, just taken to future extremes. Also reminiscent of Philip K Dick

Problems #1, 2,, 3 and 4 are

1. Direction (director demanding too litle of actors) 2. Lack of funds (it looks a bit like theatre, but not taking the consequences entirely) 3. Editing (the pace is unnecessarily slow, but I guess it's simply too short - not enough dramatic elements and funds tie it to few locations) 4. Lack of live characters (even if most action takes place between the main protagonist and characterns not present (in the VR-realm))

So, it's kinda not very excitingly presented - sadly, as its brimming with original ideas (eg. Virtual assassination unlocking an insurance premium killing off the original human, but giving rise to a much better version of self - I mean: That's so ridiculously cold and completely in tune with the whole world built! Brilliant!)

I wont NOT give credit for the script. This gets the points. 7.5 out of 10 for the script. I wish I could give it more, but the pacing is really deadly.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020)

With responsibility to the world.

[9/10 · 4 July 2020]

9/10

looking at the demographics the 8-10 vote outshines the 1-3 vote 1:3.

And there's a reason for that.

This infections piece about growing up, its exuberance, its enthusiasm, its dance and song and fancy cars and swag har and suits, its humanity right to the core, is better understood by adults and compasionates than it is reviled by haters and by children wanting the world to stay exactly as it is..

It does a very good job showing how seeds of fear and hathred are sown by the "same source", and how this source works relentlessly to win over the weakest, because any army mostly need cannon fodder and compatriots, not individuals who can think for themselves. And those who CAN think, are the real opponents or allies.

They are visible in the demographics of this series. The wall builders. The communicators. And the confused, who find it hard, like the main character, to make a principle stand, which has nothing to do with customs, but everything with finding themselves and what they must learn to live with. Adults. Not good, not bad. Responsible for their beliefs.

I commend the writer - how he grew up from entertaining thrill in the first Penny Dreadful, albeit very good and representative of the skinny darkness of fiction (And I ADORE Eva Green!) - but this story, even if hampered by performance issues, rises way above the gothic tale that was 3 seasons of inventiveness and very well could have continued, had it not run out of myth and legend and plain need to demonstrate how any dramatic material is not really based on inspiration, but on what you want to say.

The move to contemporary pain and fear and joy and passing of the moment is a bold one.

I tip my hat, sir.

Battle for Terra (I) (2007)

Do you feel peaceful?

[2/10 · 26 January 2019]

Do you remember any of the movies you saw, where the evil aliens invaded, and the heroic Earthling tried to forge a pact, but the evil aliens went right ahead anyway, but Earth won the day, and the Aliens lost big?

Do you remember scripts that turned it upside down, where the benevolent and peaceful aliens came to Earth only to be killed and maimed, but one of the aliens got through to one of the poor misled Earthlings and managed via a totally unconnected civilian to stop the bloodshed and forge a lasting peace?

Well, this is a mess in-between. And it really IS a mess. Which is rather strange, as a normal movie can be saved in the cutting room, whilst an animated film must be strong from the beginning and through all scenes. And this pile of manure is manure from the get go:

advanced species has learned peace but is secretly constructing weapons from old technology in wait for the day, when their peace will be destroyed.

The assumption is that once someone finds peace, some bully will try to get him, so the peaceful guy might as well keep some weapons in the basement.

And the heroin, who is peaceful and loving and imaginative and delightfully playfull, must - following this rule - turn vengeful and primitive, adhering to the species DNA and dark past as criminal murderers and haters.

Thus we have the strange mix of an animated movie, certainly NOT pixar, telling everybody and their granny how peace is a good thing, and then goes on in good old US fashion to demonstrate that peace is a job for soldiers, who must kill to get to the peace part, and if you do a little hating on the way, its only good for morale.

No body wrote this film, I completely reject the idea that the story had human intervention. It was simply regurgitated from an automatic script machine based on every action movie ever produced in Hollywood or inspired by any of the same movies, with a detour over script machines for video games and eco animation.

There you have it. Its a ghost of war and hate and ecology and complete misunderstanding of the concept of peace.

Peace is not the absence of murder or war or abuse or destruction. Peace is feeling inherently good about what you do. And if you can feel good about destruction, that is peace too.

Tell that to your children. All the other lies are just the military establishment trying to sell you THEIR reality. And gun manufacturers trying to sell you theirs. And supremacists trying to sell you theirs.

Do you feel good about yourself? Well, do you, punk?!

Solis (2018)

Always judge based on now, not expectations

[9/10 · 3 November 2018]

I don't wanna go politics on you all, but a British movie racing against the clock in order to come to a singular goal makes me think of a great loss of community.

Now, forget I said that. This is not a very British movie, and it's not sentimental, and it's not Hollywood, and even if the race against the clock is an ancient premise in any action movie, this is a spectacular "spanner in the wheel" kind of story that you may remember for a long time.

When you are young, you easily think you've seen it all - there aren't that many relevant plots in any genre and all of them have been told countless times over. But when the telling of the story, the big HOW to get from plot point to plot point begins to merge with actual knowledge all of the concepts in life giving value and causing loss, which can only be identified with, if your lived through them to survive and NOT have the things in your life be lost, OR if you in fact see yourself move on as they take a seat in memory only, such a story moves from being just a performance of glorious or inglorious actions and mistakes and accidents and blessings and luck to be a representation of the values of fragile existence.

Such is a good story. It may be singular or it may be complex, but judged on its own terms, if will make you feel less on your own with everything in your own life.

Such a movie is Solis. I find the acting to be right on the nose and in tune with the whole reason for what drives the character, which is so closely connected to the purpose of the movie that you have to trust the actor's portrayal. That he is not just acting against fate, but constantly struggling with what he has become. Every action and reaction has that at its center, and he fits the part perfectly. We do not see calm or surrender or despair or hope - we witness someone who is doing the calculation of "is life worth living" all the time. "Am I worthy of life?"

For more than the end part of the movie I was constantly just about to take myself out of its influence, but remained, at the edge of the seat, in order to give him then chance of redemption, if in any way possible. Reclaiming the honor he left behind.

I give it 9/10 - the last one I retain for 2-3 too misplaced pieces of dialogue in an otherwise very tight script.

I still cannot get over that its a British movie. Now, do better than Hollywood. Make more European sci-fi.

Higher Power (2018)

a script coach next will get you so much farther.

[6/10 · 24 October 2018]

The problem all the way through is where the "right gene" comes from and why THAT is important. Everything builds on that, from the original story to the acting to the rather spectacular and inventive SFX, which causes suspension of disbelief to NOT set it. Too bad. The $500.000 invested in this could have come to so much better use, if $5000 more was spent on a script coach with the good sense to permit an original story.

6/10 for all the good effort. I believe it could have earned 8/10 with a tiny origin story, how ever preposterous or mysterious.

Go again!

Impulse (2018–2019)

Series ends 10 minutes into last episode!?

[3/10 · 26 June 2018]

Impulse (2018. Ep01 the first 5 minutes pulled me in like the cow splitting in "Under the dome" ep01, but even so the singular deal-with-rape in a budding recognition of teleportation powers-story with both international and local side story persecution is maybe wisely only given 10 eps, and how they will resolve even that in the last 4 eps is beyond me.

Then for unfathomable reasons I DID watch the last 4 episoded:

What absolute CRUD! Worst piece of story arc and incomprehensible approval by story excecs since Andromeda - and that was even understandably bad. It MUST have been sold on the tele-transportation effects ALONE, and then all of the studio excecs left for holiday for the duration of shooting and came back to this!

What a perfect REAL waste of time!

(And that is not discounting the contained rape-attempt story, the Viewer distrection "beware of foul language and disturbing images" at the beginning of every episode, and the Rape hotline telephone number at the end of every episode. WAS this series commissioned by an anti-rape organisation!? I don't mind that, if that can either give power back to rape victims or prevent even one rape altogether, but there IS such a thing as QUALITY, and if you drop the ball in a multimillion dollar advertising campaign, it will be a while before you are given the chance again. These script writers should NOT have worked on something of this relevance! Eg.: the last episode ended 10 minutes in, and the rest was talk stalling and waiting for the 45 minutes mark and season cliff-hanger. Talk about incompetence. Wouldn't the last episode be where you create wonderful expectations and aspirations for the next season?!

Set the Thames on Fire (2015)

Unbelievably SAD

[8/10 · 16 October 2016]

I saw it with half an eye on my work - couldn't bear to watch it.

There's a moment, when an aging magician performs one last trick, which made me pause and almost cry, but otherwise all of the other characters were representatives of a world lost onto itself - the horrifying image of every man for himself, when the *beep* hits the fan.

"As long as Iam alright". "And if I'm more than a little stupid or hope is just as good as an occasional free drink, then at least the monotony of slow death is broken".

It's probably one of the most bleak movies I have seen due to its severe chill of coming death.

its as a dying body with an almost dead heart in it, which only has one more trick it it... The rest is just on auto, because that how humans get through the day, and the ages.

Sorry, people - its a vision, not a failure. This is: "Don't go down this way". Which is way too much message for good art, but effective in all of its bleakness.

But REMARKABLE acting during this death of civilization. Sally Philips, Lily Loveless, Noel Fielding, Sadie Frost, Gerard Mcdermott, who make BIG of few lines. Its like a new generation to me, not being British. Tight fear, real insanity, comic vulgarity as in "everything is a (painful) laugh, when you're on a slow sinking ship".

I give it 8/10. Because its so goddamn painful!

Sorry, I just could not look it straight in the eyes. Thats me. Too much truth.

The Last Templar (2009)

what to do Sundays, when skipping church

[3/10 · 1 February 2016]

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Mira Sorvino was Sandra Bullock, never a sad face below 7/10

Scott Foley was tom hanks/similar, and never really in play

Nice settings, desert, island, plane, Land Rover

serious pace-stopping adult talk to extend the script to 3 hours

unnecessary daughter and brother, who were never in play

foul search by cruel and non-establishment-representing delusional mad scientist for the means to tumble the Christian church

and then BAM, 2hrs 40 minutes in, right in your face the whole shebang turns Christian.

Should have seen it coming. Male lead being catholic and all. But they actually masked it in hints and dibble-dabble half-voiced background story to build the male lead character.

Honestly, it really was a shocker. For someone who goes a long way to avoid movies advocating Christianity over simply putting faith in what ever gets you through life, if was a transgression.

Aside from that, either the script or its direction masks the actual implications of finding a gospel of Jesua from Nazareth. Christians would know what that means, but non-believers, who normally don't give a toss, has to sort of count fingers here, one, two, three... Ah, a gospel by Jesus means that he wasn't the Man. That he didn't die on a cross, or resurrect, thus laying waste to the foundations of the Christian / Catholic Church and making all of it's bloodshed in the name of just another disciple kinda unnecessary... That kind of story. And yes, Vatican priest gets famous last words:" We've put our faith in God for 2000 years, and our belief in the Saviour. We can survive any crazy stunt to discredit us".

But, really, I don't care. I just feel robbed of my time. Mira Sorvino probably had a really good time, looking all the time as if she's having a really good time, powerful lady, her own woman, don't let anybody in, but will turn to God for help, when love strikes. Right - that's the scientific method, when everything else fails.

This movie is made for Sundays. There is not an ounce of relevant tension in it. It should just be gobbled down like forgotten ice-cream melting on the counter.

Or avoided for a diet more honest to its viewers.

Or just labeled correctly: No thoughts necessary, Christian or otherwise, as you will leave as you came in. Un-changed. And we are not talking soul here, okay!

3/10

Our Brand Is Crisis (2015)

"When I was young, I admired certain politicians and statesmen. Then I met them "

[9/10 · 19 January 2016]

It seems to me none of the previous 30-something reviews get the project. For it IS a project. It IS a political film.

Sandra Bullock knows HER brand and she uses it well. It is the staff of Bullock magic, with which she sprinkles life into a rather boring topic - and makes a rather non-dramatic, dare I say Almost Realistic", script relevant?

SB and her co-producer, George Clooney - who is also a brand-aware actor, who uses HIS brand well, alternately for earning money and for teaching youngsters about the world - are right on the money with this story of How Politics Are Wrought And The Consequences Of Wanting Power Enough To Risk The Fallout.

Sandra Bullock is the campaign manager, who long ago lost faith in politics as a way to change the world. "When I was young, I admired certain politicians and statesmen. Then I met them…"

When opportunity comes begging, she is lured out of a deliberate hiatus by the chance to get even with an old colleague.

What follows is a lesson - albeit 101 - in coming back from the dead, when you have forsaken every ideal you once had for vengeance or fame or money or just for doing it, again, and again. Leaving the hamster wheel of old habits and lost self-respect is no easy measure, but like she says to a politician at one point during a TV-debate on the campaign trail: "If you should feel something there, in the heat of the moment, something real, just turn your face to the camera". And when SHE feels something for the first time in years, tentatively she follows her own advice - though not for any other gain than to win back her own self-respect. The power she had traded in for anger, pride, whatever.

I gave it 9/10 - not because of the script, even if it is very, very honed down to basics, and not for the many dramatically correct internal references (the fly in the mask, the mask on the face…), nor for its unusual setting in Bolivia, or for its very true to life representation of the Bolivian willingness to believe and their almost innocent disappointment and anger, when politicians lie to them yet again, or because of the very beautiful depiction of a politician in new-found power, who is uneasy with the consequences of have lied, or for the faith in the project as a whole, speaking on a very understandable level, with Sandra Bulluck being true to Sandra Bullock in every scene (admit it, she brightens every movie she's in!) - but for all of it.

You can watch it again and again, because it's not dangerous, but its message is effective: The cost of power is power. But hope of liberation is offered to all. Do you take it?

I would.

Listening (2014)

The war on people - the magicians other hand!

[9/10 · 20 October 2015]

An excellent script well performed.

--

When you look at a street in almost any city in the western world today, you see cameras pointing towards the street to automatically and silently film people going about their regular business.

The way to protect yourself from this kind of information gathering is by hiding your face ALWAYS, when you are outside. Which would most likely garner you a more intense surveillance - possibly wiretapping and your house bugged and your friends bugged and you mail read and electronic activities monitored, all the way up to physical intervention, incarceration, "evidence planted", defamation - possibly elimination, if the watchers cant make you.

If you go on the net, there is no mechanism designed to cover your tracks and actions, which cannot be cracked - leaving your thought patterns, your needs, your funding, connections, friends, family etc wide open to blatant scrutiny or simple data gathering. Forget about VPN or Tor or what ever. One slip, and your IP is toast and not just your secrets are out, but everything your have ever shared digitally with anyone over the net.

Why is that? Because ever since 9/11 USA and all other countries (in order to be able to send and receive plane passengers from all over) have treated their citizens and citizens of most other nations as suspects - potential threats to cities, infrastructure, businesses, economic structures and institutions and their national citizens too, if not for humanitarian reasons then from an attempt to prevent widespread fear and out-of-control actions taken by more than gun-ready-and-willing men and women.

What if that lack of control over citizens could go away within a short while? What if USA, always seeking to be the bigger, the stronger, the wisest brother in the world, found a way to do that? What if the war on people was really patricide/matricide from blind greed, last rat gets the bigger loot?!

= = = = = = = = = = = = = SPOILER = = = = = = = = = = = = =

This movie explores well know themes of surveillance and mind control in order to show that mainstream people only used to guns in the media don't realize surveillance and monitoring and pooling private information is really a weapon against a nation's citizens, not a protection from foreigners.

As an intellectual exercise this is kinda easy to both realize and sort of accept, but when you actually understand the implications of controlling powers being able to predict your actions and opinions and choices, it loses its intellectual shine as it verges towards actual loss of freedom - of mobility, speech, purchasing power, schooling, teaching, voting, housing, participating, giving aid and assistance etc.

Population control is becoming an increasingly difficult task, as shown by the recent Sicario (2015), where whole major cities can be besieged by criminal and violent "examples" and all "loyalty" goes to those, who can instill fear, rather than to those who protect.

While "Listening" may skip a bit on the realistic side, when it comes to calculating the consequences of thinking, feeling people falling pray to fascistic measures without relevant opposition - thus over-playing both spread and danger of a technological mind-control scheme - the script still manages to represent the eager greed with which possible control of people's patterns and actions is to be measured. (It IS lucky that everything living by electricity will die from lack of electricity or from magnetism. Making an EMP placed here and there hunky dory, if ever they tried anything similar in reality).

But don't take the movie as a literal statement. Take it as a pointer to the magician's other hand: What is everyone upholding power doing in their free time, that they do not want out in the open? What are they doing during working hours, that they don't want to share? See this film as an argument for full disclosure - as long as it is out of VOLITION. In an atmosphere of distrust, meaning: "You go first..."

Time Trap (2013)

The short end of the technology stick

[10/10 · 23 December 2014]

-------SPOILER ALERT ------

Time Trap is a very humorous short depicts what happens, when you have the short end of the technology-stick: Humanity is wiped out, most likely by a Terminator-like nuclear event, and a bumbling spaceman is stealing resources out of time as if the living past doesn't matter to those living in it.

The bumbling spaceman, in order to find spare parts for his ailing ship, employs his Time Bubble generator to locate a situation, where he can steal a precious rock, a diamond, to use as fuel for his ship. A man on a bench is viewed in several time instances throughout his life, and the spaceman keeps turning back the clock until the day the man on the bench is young and about to propose. Then the spaceman nicks the engagement ring.

In one instance the past is over - in another it is still happening. Which is a very valid point when dealing with time travel as viewed from the future - one that raises the question of "Should I meddle with time?" From the future POW there is no valid reason to assume it matters, as the past has already happened, meaning, in a sense: Anything Goes. But is this really the only valid point?

This is very confusing for someone who is brought up to care about other life: One could then say, that there should be a distinction between time travelers - the one who travels to learn, and the one who only cares for himself.

From a future point of view the first can be seen as merely being the cause of the future he/she travels from, but the other, due to his/her disregard for consequences of their meddling for selfish gain, should be seen as perpetrating crimes against humanity. Crimes against life itself.

The spaceman of the movie obviously only regards the past time as a resource for his own survival. He comes from another planet/galaxy, and really: in how high regard can you place a tiny temporal anomaly - on a planet distant from your own - in context to the whole universe?

But then again, how different is this from us, who empty the Earth of resources on order to survive in the now?

It's quite miraculous how many questions about existence can be raised in less than 8 minutes.

Brilliant short.

ETXR (2014)

Will there be a sequel, or is everything explained on a DVD commentary track?

[5/10 · 11 June 2014]

Bix the Bug persuades his MIT-buddy to loan him his Tesla device - in order to find a crucial new sound with witch to attract people to his DJ-shows. Bix' old pal and manager is only in it for the money - which becomes obvious from the several times he goes behind Bix' back to sell the Tesla device to bad guys. "You don't know what you have", says the super bad guy, "who owns half of Europa or something..." But as it will soon become obvious... so does no one else.

Bix refuses to sell, now that incorporating the Tesla device into his performances has brought him success with his concerts. The protests of his MIT-friend, that making the sounds from the device public will bring bad people scrambling to (for what ever reason - we are not told), are quietly dealt with by spiking him with some Ecstasy - so "he can live a little, maybe for the first time."

And so it is. The MIT-buddy is happily persuaded to go along with Bix' plans - but some eco- terrorists, whose power pack the Tesla device is using, come to take both away, and Bix is shown an image of his buddy on a phone, dead from a bullet to the head. "This is what will happen if you don't deliver the power pack to us!"

Bix has a vision that his friend is not dead, and discovers the whereabouts of the power pack. He is now fully attuned to the Tesla device and certain that the sounds it is producing are extraterrestrial, and that the receptions through the device are a sequence of some importance.

YaddaYaddaYadda - Bix and his manager buddy drive to the Joshua tree in the desert and text his crowd to come for one last concert. During the concert the power pack is failing, but when Bix directly interfaces with the device, it somehow attains enough power to finish the sequence of received sounds. Which result in a nice light shower in the night sky - much like the final light show from Spielberg's Close Encounters - in the shape of a giant flower.

And that's it.

What was it? Some Ecstasy vision?

But then we see, as we have seen throughout the film - as Bix has explained how he has always felt watched - an image of every human in his or her own existence of observation, in their own consciousness sphere, life bubble or similar explanation. All are like little mirrors of existence (similar to the surveillance layout from the TV-series "Person of Interest"). All are simultaneously co-existing in the same sphere - the Earth. And the camera pulls out to show the whole of the Earth. And pulls further and further back, until we see that the whole of the galaxy consists of the same gatherings of life-spheres.

End. --

I was not bored. Just very annoyed with the script. And the actors. The message is fine - but as a postulate is leaves the film hanging: We go through all this, SO that the director can tell us the Universe is teaming with life?!

Some other review called it new-age crap or the like. I wouldn't go as far. I see a scriptwriter and a director striving to bring forth a vision - but if feels awfully like an Ecstasy vision. In the sense: It is a projection of personal need upheld only by this need.

The same with the consciousness bubbles in the movie - on Earth and in the Universe. (Which may also be little spheres of surveillance by some other entity - it is open to interpretation.) You can say they are there. But then what?

That is the problem with the script throughout. Nothing is made to matter. Relations, concepts, fates, threats. I was never involved. I was curious to see if the makers themselves knew where they were going. But I believe I can now safely say that if they did, they kept it to themselves.

Antiviral (2012)

Presence is perfection

[10/10 · 1 June 2013]

10/10

When people are afraid of themselves, and feel insufficient and un-whole, worshiping provides solace and meaning. But there is no preaching a better world in sight in "Antiviral". Here we have a society so close to the reality of United States of A that only a tiny shift in the use of cloning and a solid retreat of celebs into impenetrable ivory tower industries - with all media peddling simply nothing but presence, forget talent, presence is perfection - just a tiny shift could make it viable: Lets say... the total loss of faith in politicians and clerics and the road is all paved to real deification of humans. Tiny shift. Something familiar, yet unapproachable to believe in...

Brandon Cronenberg, David Croneberg's son, has taken his father's fixations on the limits of the body and humans inhabiting them to a higher level. Antiviral is a very slick film, in the best meaning of the word, worth every point on the 10-scale. The setting, the casting, the apparent loose ends, the makeup, the music, oh, the MUSIC, which is not music, but sounds vibrating and humming and clicking and whispering, to make a sinister cathedral of the body and succeeding, the future tech, the acting, the whole performance of the idea is simply credible!

Antiviral is an absolutely brilliant story of diverting sight from god to find divinity in human made icons. Anyone famous cannot be wrong, even their diseases are attractive and communion can be found at corner shops, where pieces of human muscle tissue grown in vats from cell samples can be purchased and eaten as beef. And fully licensed clinics, where diseases rendered uncommunicative for a high price can be entered into the blood stream of those wishing communion with their deities. Where some would call it a summons back to the fold, I see it as Christianity (rightly) being pushed to the corner to stand there gawking at this lewd display of body eroticism dripping of blood and bile and boils and festering wounds and sores suffered with by those seeking sanctuary in worship.

To Brandon Cronenberg here is no difference between institutionalized religion and tattoos, car collecting, used underwear of famous women, Nazi memorabilia, obsolete technology and design etc. - anything that brings solace can be worshiped and communicated through presence (=doing).

Malcolm McDowell delights in yet a sinister part, but to rival his best, as he for once is sinister only from ignorance and need; an educated doctor, who is caught up in the worship of celebrity, to matter-of-factly state that he neither understands the technique of copyright protecting viruses nor the ramifications of participating in the worship of celebrity, and nor does he try to; he just worships.

Our lead, brilliantly played by Caleb Landry Jones, has the most clarity of everyone around him. It doesn't come easy to him: All during the story he is infecting himself with the diseases that his company is peddling - searching for something that eludes him, with such a single-mindedness that it makes him willing to go to any length.

While infected with the worshiped icon's latest contracted disease, he comes to understand life's worthlessness, should he lose his house of worship, his body of worship. While everyone else are thinking small, mercantile thoughts, on the brink of dying he cooks up the most brilliant of ideas, which will allow him to come the closest to his deity that any living human can and will.

Camille Rewinds (2012)

Camille Redouble does mostly everything right.

[8/10 · 26 May 2013]

8/10

The thing that makes this '2nd chance'-time travel plot a really good story is the lead's resistance to repeating the past - in this I cheered her on and wished for the best, because she tries so very hard to avoid the bad things from her adult life and focuses on making the good things happen, most importantly her pregnancy. Watching her come to terms with the things, she realizes she cannot change - most of all her own feelings - is watching an immature adult finally take on adulthood.

That she is also never overly smart, ie. exploiting her superior knowledge of events or experience of life lived, makes her presence in her past one of watching consciousness and self confidence at play. One can imagine oneself being utterly certain about events, as if one had lived them before - and willing to pay the price of certainty.

I don't care about the (surprisingly few) little inconsistencies in the plot - all that matters is the lead being true to her heart. And I was genuinely relieved (if not surprised) that she lets go of trying to fight her heart and starts listening to it, rather than hiding in a bottle.

This message runs through the movie, even to the quoting of the 12 step confirmation: "... and the wisdom to know the difference." It is not moralizing, but there appears to be a need to bring it across. If you come away with only the conclusion that there is no love at the bottom of a bottle, you have probably made the director happy.

Apart from this I really enjoyed the director-lead in her roles - she shone, when she played 16, and looked her real age, when she let the energy evaporate, and then managed to merge the two in the final scenes. Good energy manifestation!

In the tradition of French movies, it is with more than a touch of poetry and focus on genuine human emotions, here the touch of lips as the deciding factor and holder of all important memories, that the movie concludes. French movies remember the body and don't focus overly on sex. Very important in Western and specifically European culture, with the present battle raging between explicitness and sensuality: Remember that the body remembers everything, and that we ARE our bodies!

BTW: I DO wonder if the bicycle crash was an accident, but boy, that looked like something you don't walk away from unscathed!